Through the Looking Glass

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The partisans who are fighting defense in what they call the
"war on Christmas" have an interesting view of the fight. Take
Bill O'Reilly, who proclaims the glory of the season:

Rev. Tim Bumgardner: I think they should put a Nativity
scene --- be American! Hey, celebrate Christmas --- people spend
more money! Jesus makes people want to spend money!

O'Reilly: I agree. I'm with you.

while promising to visit horror on anyone
who doesn't share his view. Buying gifts isn't enough; you have to
recite his chosen shibboleths. Though you may not have to go to
church; several of the large evangelical churches which are riding fat
on the culture war won't be holding Sunday services. A
morning with their new tchotchkes is apparently too much to ask these
folks to sacrifice for their Lord. All of which represents, perhaps,
a curious inversion of what an earlier age might have regarded as the
spirit of the season.

But there are other curious inversions in this neck of the woods.
These folks claim to support a literal reading of the Christian
Bible. Which is a bit odd, because the figure they worship is
recorded in that book as repeatedly speaking in parables, whose whole
point is that they shouldn't be interpreted literally. But
where it gets really odd is when they then go on to make
assertions that are contradicted by the plain letter of the book.
Like making flat assertions that this is the "last
generation" before the return of Jesus, which involves (to put it
charitably) fudging the famous injunction in the book that "No man
knows the day and the hour". (They're only claiming to know the year,
you see, so that's OK).

Then, there's their remarkably selective interpretation of Old
Testament prohibitions: they take the penalties against gay sex very
seriously, but take a somewhat more relaxed view of the stern
prohibition against clothes made of more than one fiber type. Which
is an attitude which (as has often been noted) seems to color some of
their interpretation of the New Testament as well. "It is easier for
a camel to go through the eye of a needle," said Jesus, "than for a
rich man to enter the Kingdom of God". And it's well recorded, as
these things go, in three of the four synoptic gospels. This, in
combination with numerous admonitions to help the poor and the weak,
would seem to yield a somewhat differentattitude toward social
justice than reading the gospels themselves would seem to suggest.

Well, hey, they're literalists. They don't go in for
interpretation. So maybe they think that the parable
of the sheep and the goats was meant to refer to actual sheep and
actual goats. (Although it literally does talk about "my brethren",
which you could "literally" interpret to mean... oh, never mind).
Besides, such concerns might not be foremost to their Jesus
--- the avenger Jesus who appears, literally Deus ex Machina, at the
end of the Left Behind books, not to redeem the sinners, but to
spill
their guts onto the ground and cast them into fire.

But the curious inversions just abound. Let's just look at our
most highly placed evangelical, for a brief minute or two.
This country, the greatest
empire of its age, self-consciously modeled by its founders on Rome,
is now being run by a figure who claims profound religious inspiration
yet rarely goes to
church, who defines strength by brute power, whose domestic
programs feature abject neglect of the poor (most visibly after
Katrina) and an emphasis on succor to the rich (in tax cut after tax
cut), who has allowed a few low-level soldiers to take the fall for
what seems to be systematic torture in his army (which has occured on
numerous occasions and which may
have ordered personally), who takes bizarre actions like pulling
down trees in Iraqi farmers' groves for the apparent thrill of
violating not only the Geneva Conventions ban on collective
punishment, but a direct biblical injunction against
doing exactly that.

It's almost as if we've fallen under the dominion of an anti-...

You fill in the blank.

The curious inversions extend as well to his
style of following his oath to preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution: his response, when called on an
obvious, pointless violation of black-letter law
is to make obviously specious claims to have the
authority to break the law, while demanding that the people who
called him out be punished.
But I'm perplexed at the sudden furor here. Habeas Corpus is in the
constitution too, Dubya's violation of that has been every bit as
blatant, the legal excuses only slightly less obviously specious, and
the violation of civil and basic human rights far, far more severe.
So why all the outrage over wiretaps? Alberto Gonzales is perplexed
--- and for once, I must agree with the son of a bitch.